The Voyage of the Star Wolf

by David Gerrold

  Korie stepped in quickly to Captain Lowell’s side. It seemed as if everything on the Operations deck were beeping, buzzing, ringing, and clanging. He ignored it. “The missiles, sir?” he prompted.

  “Yes, yes, of course.” The old man looked almost grateful. “Ready missiles!”

  “Recommend an evasion course, sir,” Korie prompted.

  “Yes. Make it so.” Lowell nodded eagerly at Korie’s suggestion.

  Is he that scared? Korie wondered. So far, only Hodel could have noticed—and he was too busy with his own board to say anything about it.

  Hodel’s panel blinked and flickered. He slammed it with his fist—HARD—it was a reaction, not a cure; the computer channels on that console were locked up, thrashing with contradictory information; but the screens came immediately back to life anyway. Hodel muttered an oath and resumed working, laying in a series of complex evasion patterns. And then he glanced up at Korie knowingly. “This isn’t going to work.”

  “Shut up,” said Korie. “Do you want to live forever?”

  “It’s a trap,” said Lowell. He was visibly flustered. “We can’t fight the Dragon Lord and a wolf pack.”

  Korie noted that the old man was getting more ragged-looking every moment, but there wasn’t time to do anything. If the attack was every captain’s nightmare, then Captain Lowell’s disintegration was every executive officer’s nightmare. Korie was going to have to make it work. Abruptly, the targeting program chimed. Korie snapped, “Targets in range!”

  “Missiles armed!” called Li on the weapons station. “Locking . . . one, two—locked.”

  Korie touched Captain Lowell’s arm almost imperceptibly.

  It worked. “Fire all missiles,” said Lowell, not even realizing how he’d been nudged.

  The two missilemen, Li and Greene, punched their red buttons. The boards flashed yellow, then green. The bay doors snapped open. The missiles dropped away from the ship—

  The bright bubble surrounding the ship flickered and disappeared, dropping the vessel rudely out of hyperstate. A dozen missiles accelerated away. The envelope shimmered back into existence and the starship was superluminal again. The missiles were already igniting their hyperstate torches. They flared against the darkness and arrowed toward their targets with a speed no vessel could outrun. In the display, they were bright red points, moving faster than any of the pink shimmers representing Morthan ships.

  The missiles would seek, they would close, they would pursue, and ultimately they would intercept and destroy. They could not be outrun—but they did not have the endurance of a larger vessel. They had to catch their targets in the first few minutes, or not at all. Their power would fail and they would wink out, exhausted.

  The battle display told the story. Pink shimmers would blink and a dozen bright red pinpoints would streak across the intervening space toward the nearest blue shimmers. Or blue shimmers would blink, dropping missile spreads of their own—but most of them were fleeing, scattering and running into the darkness at top speed.

  Korie was watching one particular flight of missiles. Some of the pink shimmers were dodging. Haphazard bright flashes demonstrated where other ships were already flashing out of existence. Most of them were blue.

  “We’ve lost the Melrose,” said Hodel, glancing down at his monitors. “—and the Gower. The Columbia’s down too.”

  Korie turned to Captain Lowell. “You’re right, sir,” he said carefully. “We’re too visible. Suggest we drop from sight. Go subluminal—”

  “You can’t hide from them. They’ll find us,” cried Hodel.

  “We don’t have time to argue,” said Korie. He pointed at the display. “Look—incoming!” The missiles were coming at them from three different directions now. The software was screaming alarms. The display was flashing wildly.

  Lowell said something; Korie didn’t understand it, he assumed that it was assent. “Do it!” he yelled at Hodel and the flight engineer punched his board. The starship shuddered as the hyperstate envelope collapsed around her.

  “Rig for shock-charging—”

  Korie never got a chance to complete the order. The faintest fringe of ripple effect from one of the hyperstate missiles hit them then, with an effect as devastating as a direct hit from a disruptor beam. Every electrical field in the LS-1187 was momentarily discharged. Every instrument, every machine, every communications device, and every human being was suddenly paralyzed.

  Every neuron fired at once. It was like touching a live wire. Every person on the ship went instantly rigid as their nervous systems overloaded. Their hearts froze, unable to beat; their muscles tightened in agony; the screams were forced involuntarily from their lungs; all their brain cells discharged completely into oblivion, triggering massive seizures and convulsions; their bowels and bladders let loose. Some of the men ejaculated involuntarily. Hodel spasmed and was thrown backward out of his chair. It saved his life. His console sparked and then blew up. Captain Lowell staggered, almost falling. Korie grabbed for him—they both collapsed to the floor. Korie had a flickering impression of flowers and purple fire and then nothing else.

  All over the Operations deck and Bridge, the effects of the shock-charge were still going off. Wild electrical fire was flashing everywhere. Balls of lightning roiled around the chamber, bouncing and flashing, sputtering and burning.

  Everywhere, crewmembers spasmed and shuddered and jerked across the deck, helpless. A flicker of purple lightning skewered Captain Lowell, enveloping him.

  The same lightning flashed through the engine room, up and down the corridors of the vessel, and all around the singularity grid that held the ship’s power source: a pinpoint black hole. The energy had no place to discharge—it tried to bleed off in a thousand separate directions, finally found weakness and leapt out through the portside disruptors; they exploded in a blossom of sparks and fire.

  And the LS-1187 was dead in space.

  Recalled to Life

  For a long dead moment, she drifted.

  Then—slowly, painfully, life began to reassemble itself. A heartbeat, a gasp, a twitch, and finally even a flicker of thought. Somebody moved. Somebody else choked. There was a moan in the darkness and a terrible stench.

  The ship was pitch dark—and so silent it was terrifying. All of the familiar background whispers were gone. Korie came back to consciousness screaming. He felt as if he were on fire. All his nerve ends were shrieking. He couldn’t move—and he couldn’t stay still. He tried to move, he couldn’t. He was floating, rolling, bumping and drifting back the opposite way. He couldn’t think. His head jangled. Free fall, he realized. The gravity’s off.

  He stretched out his arms, grunting in pain as he did so, and tried to feel where he was, trying to grasp—his head banged into something and his body twisted. He grabbed and missed and grabbed again, caught a railing and held on. Something else bumped into him, something soft and wet; it felt like a body, he grabbed it and held on. Whoever it was, he was still unconscious. Or . . .

  “HARLIE?” he asked.

  No response. He didn’t expect one. It was still bad news. If the ship was totally dead, then so were they. The CO2 buildup would get them within hours. His head hurt and his shirt and shorts were drenched with sweat and blood. He’d fouled himself as well.

  “Starsuits.” Korie said it aloud. But if the ship was without power, then the suits would probably be dead too.

  What was wrong with the auxiliary power? Why hadn’t it kicked in?

  “Captain?” Li’s voice. He sounded strained. “Mr. Korie? Anyone?”

  Korie caught his breath. He couldn’t believe how his lungs ached. “Here,” he said. “Can you move?”

  “I don’t know. I’m caught on something. What’s wrong with the power?”

  “I don’t know. Anyone else conscious?” Korie called.

  He was answered by groans and pleas for help. Someone was crying softly. That was a good sign, Korie thought. If you have the strength to cry, you have th
e strength to heal. “Hodel?” he asked. “Hodel, where are you?”

  The crying hesitated.

  “Hodel, is that you?”

  “Over here, sir.” A different direction.

  “You okay?”

  “I will be. In a year or two.”

  “I think the emergency power system failed. We’re going to have to plug in the fuel cells manually and jump start the system.”

  Hodel groaned.

  “Can you move?”

  “I can move. I just don’t know where I am.”

  “All right. I’m on a railing. And I’m holding onto someone. Wait a minute, let me see if I can feel who it is.” Korie moved his hand carefully across the other man’s body, trying to find a shoulder so he could feel the insignia. . . .

  He was holding the captain.

  He pulled the captain closer to him, felt for his neck and his jugular vein.

  He couldn’t tell if the captain was alive or not.

  Korie didn’t want to let go of him, but there was nothing else he could do for Captain Lowell until some kind of light was restored to the Bridge. Korie felt his way along the railing; it was the railing of the Bridge. He reached the end and felt his way down to the floor. Good. He knew where he was now. Still holding on to the railing, he felt his way back along the floor to the emergency panels. If he was right—

  He popped the floor panel open and felt around inside the compartment. There. He pulled out a flashbeam and prayed that it still worked. It should; it held a solid-state fuel cell.

  It did.

  There were cheers as he swept the beam across the Operations deck. Besides Captain Lowell, there were two other bodies floating unconscious. There were dark globules of blood and vomit and shit floating in the air. Hodel was hanging onto a chair; so was Li.

  “Hodel? Can you move?”

  “I haven’t tried—” Cautiously he launched himself toward Korie. He floated across the Operations deck and grabbed at the Bridge railing, grimacing as he caught it. “If that’s what it’s like to be dead, I don’t like it.”

  “It’s not the dead part that hurts. It’s the coming back.”

  “It’s a long way to come back, sir. I hurt all over.”

  “So does everyone else,” said Korie. He passed Hodel the light. “Aim it there—” He pulled himself along the floor to the next emergency panel and yanked it open. Inside was a double bank of switches. He began punching them on.

  Nothing happened. Korie and Hodel exchanged worried looks.

  “Try again?”

  Korie nodded and began punching at the buttons one more time.

  Again, nothing happened.

  “Shit,” said Korie. “All right. We’ll go down to the keel and try every fuel cell in the floor until we find a set that works. All we need is one. We’re not dead yet.” He pulled open the next panel and started passing equipment to Hodel. “I think we’ll have to—”

  Something flickered.

  The ceiling panels began to glow very softly. Hodel and Korie looked around as the emergency lights came on, and grinned.

  “All right!” said Li.

  “Listen,” said Hodel. “The circulators are back on.”

  Korie stopped and listened. “You’re right.” He tapped his headset. “Engine room?”

  Chief Engineer Leen’s voice sounded surprisingly loud in his ear. “Captain?”

  “No. Korie.” He swallowed hard. “Damage?”

  “Can’t tell yet. We’re still sealed off. Do you have light?”

  “They just came on. Thank you. The singularity?”

  “It’s still viable—”

  “Thank God.”

  “—but we’re going to have to jump start the whole system.”

  “Are your men okay?”

  “None of us are okay, sir; but we can do it.”

  “How long?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  “Sorry. Oh, Chief?” Korie added. “Don’t initiate gravity until we’ve secured the entire ship. There’s too many unconscious bodies floating.”

  “Right. Out.”

  Korie noticed that the chief had not asked about the captain. He swung to face the flight engineer. “Hodel?”

  “Sir?”

  “Take the captain to sick bay. Then come back for the others.”

  “Yes, sir.” Hodel launched himself across the Bridge, colliding clumsily with the captain. He grabbed the old man by the back of his collar and began pulling himself across the ceiling toward the rear exit.

  Korie floated across to Li. “Hold still, Wan—” Li was pinned in his chair. Korie shone his light all around the wreckage. “Okay, it doesn’t look too bad.” He anchored himself and pulled. Li floated free. “You okay?”

  “I’ve been better.”

  “There’s a sani-pack in that compartment.” Korie pointed. “Start getting some of this crap out of the air.” There were floating globules of blood and urine everywhere.

  Korie was already checking the other Bridge officers. Two of them were dead in their chairs. The third was unconscious. He wondered if there were enough survivors to bring the ship home.

  “You know, we can’t stay here,” Li said, behind him. He was vacuuming wet sphericles out of the air. “Our envelope didn’t flash out. They’re going to know we’re still alive and hiding in normal space.”

  “It’s very hard to find a dead ship. You have to be right on top of her.”

  “They’ll track our singularity with a mass-detector,” Li argued. “That’s what I’d do. They know where we went down, and they’re going to have to come looking for us to make sure. They can’t leave us here to attack the Dragon Lord.”

  “We’re not attacking anything right now,” said Korie. He floated over to the auxiliary astrogation console and began trying to reboot it.

  “They don’t know we’re hit,” the weapons specialist pointed out.

  Korie grunted. The console was dead. He drifted down to the base of it and popped open a maintenance panel. He’d run it on battery if he had to. “Everything you say is correct. But we don’t have a lot of options right now. If we recharge our hyperstate kernel, we’ll be instantly visible to any ship within a hundred light-hours, and if we inject into hyperstate, we’ll be visible for days. If they’ve englobed the area, we’ll never get out.”

  “You think you can sneak away at sublight? That’ll take weeks.”

  “We’re going to need a few weeks to rebuild this ship anyway.”

  “They’re still going to be looking for us, no matter what we do. If they don’t find us immediately, they’ll expand their search patterns. They know we’re here and we can’t shield against their scanners.”

  Korie looked over at him. “At this point, Wan, I don’t know how much of this ship is left. That’s what’ll determine what we’ll do. By rights, we should all be dead now.”

  The auxiliary astrogation console lit up then and Korie was momentarily cheered. It was a start. As each piece of the network started coming back online, it would start querying the rest of the system; if the queries went unanswered, each piece would automatically initiate its own set of restoration procedures for the equipment it could talk to. The resurrection of the ship would happen in pieces, much like the individual resurrections of each surviving crew member.

  Two of the other consoles on the Bridge flashed back to consciousness then. Korie floated over to them and punched for status reports. As he suspected, they were still isolated from the rest of the ship. They had no information to report.

  Korie considered his situation. His captain was disabled, maybe dying. His ship was dead in space and an unknown number of his crew were unconscious or dead. They were light-years from the nearest aid and they were surrounded by enemy marauders who would be looking for them as soon as they finished destroying the rest of the fleet. They had no weapons and no engines. They couldn’t retreat either sublight or superlight. And, if that weren’t enough, they were blind. All their senso
rs out of commission. He had no way of knowing if an attack was imminent, and no way of fighting back if it were.

  But on the plus side, he told himself, I’m finally in command. The irony of it was almost enough to make him smile. He tapped his headset. “Chief?”

  “It’s bad news,” said the voice in his ear. “I’m going to have to restring everything. It’ll take days.”

  “We have days,” said Korie. “Listen, I have an idea. Can you put a man in the lookout with a sextant? Take a sighting?”

  “It won’t be very accurate.”

  “It doesn’t have to be. I just want to make sure we’re pointed in a useful direction.”

  “I can do that. If we’re not, we can rotate the ship around the singularity until we are. I can even do that by hand, if I have to. We’ll rig block and tackle and walk it around.”

  “Good. Now, here’s the second part. Can you run the mass-drivers off the fuel cells—and for how long?”

  “Do you mean leave the singularity damped?”

  “Yes.”

  The chief thought a moment. “It’s very old-fashioned,” he said, “and I’m not sure what you’re gaining, but it’s doable. This is just a guess, but I can probably give you six weeks at least, maybe eight, but not more than ten.”

  “I’ll take the six. If we make it that far, God likes us. I want no stress-field activity at all for the entire time, and I want you to minimize all electrical functions. Let’s run this ship as if she’s dead. Minimum life support, minimum everything.”

  “It won’t work,” said the chief. “They’ll still find us. We can’t get far enough away.”

  “Do the math,” said Korie. “It’s not distance that works for us. It’s speed. Normal space is nasty. A constant acceleration of even one-third gee will pile up enough velocity in twelve hours as to make it practically impossible for anyone to intercept us in normal space—not unless they’re prepared to chase us for several days, more likely weeks. And if we know they’re chasing us, we plug in the singularity and go to full power and it’s still a standoff.”